Last night, at 7.30pm, I was in an Ennis pub (which I won’t name here) to take part in the Special Olympics All-County quiz, hosted on Clare FM. Why 7.30? Well, we’d be told (several times) that the quiz would start at 8pm sharp. This time didn’t go to waste though as the main invigilator read us out the rules, in detail, from an email she’d printed off, in a manner that suggested the table quiz being a new-fangled concept we needed help understanding. That said, being told that each round would have five questions did cause us to do a double take!

When did it start? 8.20pm. This is indicative of the timing problems that would plague this quiz. At 8pm Clare FM broadcast a news bulletin, followed by an ad break, followed by a Saw Doctors tune. Finally we got to hear the voice of the host but, even then, we still had to listen to his explanation of the rules, in detail once more, before we could kick off.

Round one (the Mixed Round) started off and the host flew through five general knowledge questions. This didn’t seem like a problem at the time as we knew them all. Great start, 5/5, easy!

Round two (Cocktails) followed very quickly. “Cocktails?” I asked out loud. “Good luck to ya, if you’re not a big drinker.” It turned out we weren’t big drinkers. We only knew three of them straight off but, as we do, we noted down the other two to mull over. The only problem being that we weren’t going to get and thinking time as the collectors were out of the blocks almost as soon as he’d finished repeating question 5.

This didn’t seem accidental though as, on air, the host almost immediately proceeded to round three (Inventions). We only got two of these right but I won’t complain about that. Questions are like the cards you’re dealt and everyone who’s in a quiz has to cope with them as best they can. What’s hard to understand though is structuring the quiz itself in such an awkward and unfriendly manner.

Last Friday night, along with my mrs and two of our two friends, David and Rena, I took part in a table quiz organised by the Social Club of our local county council. David used to work in said council.

The quiz took place in a (very brightly lit) back room of the Queens Hotel, Ennis. It wasn’t a very big room, which was handy for the host, who had to shout out the questions. Obviously someone had forgotten to book an amplifier!

All in all, we had a fun night. For almost the entire time, my only bug bear would have been standard of questions. Almost all were far too easy, apart from maybe one in each round, which would be damn near impossible. Perhaps this was to make up for the preceding questions? Consider: our team were two points behind the leaders a half-time (5 rounds). At the start of the final round (9, weirdly) we were still two points behind the leaders – almost everyone had gotten straight 10s for rounds 6 through 8!